The San Francisco headquarters is a fun, vibrant environment where smiles abound and the kegs are always tapped. The employees are a fun crew, well educated with extensive experience in their respective fields. The company is growing, so there is much room for career advancement.

Cons

This is a dog friendly office. Sometimes dogs bark. That can be annoying. Also, there are people who leave their dirty dishes in the sink instead of washing them or putting them in one of the two empty dishwashers. Gross.

The culture at Wikia is very casual and it shows in their nice open office located in the heart of SOMA. The people are lovely and your working hours will be flexible so long as you get stuff done. There are opportunities to travel abroad at least once a year.

Cons

Wikia is built on top of the MediaWiki framework which is a complex and aging monolith. This causes everything to move at a snails pace and really seems to limit the flexibility of the product. As such, be prepared to spend a lot of time in maintenance and bug fixing mode. From a users perspective, the general website experience, which has been assembled in small parts over the years, can be buggy, unintuitive and inconsistent.

Advice to Management

Provide your employees with some long term vision and resolve. There seems to be a really big disconnect between the senior management, employees and users in terms of expectation and product development. Don't settle for a mediocre revenue scheme; try to be more innovative and don't be afraid to push forward with some risky projects, possibly even an overhaul of the underlying frameworks and technologies used. This could really speed up product development and help bring Wikia's potential to fruition.

Overall, a great place to work. Smart people, open source technology, big scale. Good opportunity to make an impact and work on something that millions of people will use. Great work/life balance. Decent perks. Almost everyone gets to travel to the Poland office, which is fun.

Cons

Can be slow-paced sometimes. Working with a big open source project can be great but it can also add a lot of overhead.